A meme is an idea, behavior, style or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture. A meme may also be defined as a unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Examples of memes include melodies, catch-phrases, fashion, and the technology of building arches.
Recently, memes have been used in the blogging community to change people's perspectives about a particular product, competitor, politician, person, etc. For example, over a decade ago, bloggers used a negative meme (negative meme referring to implanting in people's mind a negative association) in their blogs that Java® was slow. While numerous objective bench marks have shown that Java® has not been slow in comparison to other competitor software products for over a decade, the belief that Java® is slow was still widely believed until fairly recently.
While authors, such as bloggers, have attempted to write documents (e.g., article, blog) in a manner that produces a desired meme, there are currently no tools to assist the authors in constructing a document using parts of speech, images, numbers, and so forth effectively to accomplish the desired meme or cultural transformation.